The hairdresser asked me to remove my glasses before she began cutting my hair; my mom put them in her purse.
I walked in, set down my box of belongings, and entered the kitchen. Reached towards the fridge door and pulled back with flourish.
Squeezed into tight jeans, we left the sliding-glass door ajar to avoid triggering the alarm and slipped through the backyard gate.
He told me to drive into the garage to a designated spot. I did, and got out.
Five months into our living together, my lover held me on his lap and murmured in my ear, “Will you ever leave me?”
I set my laptop next to me on the couch and go to my brother, immobile in his fully automated wheelchair.
I feed them in tandem. Wood ear mushroom for my three-year-old. A pincer-ful of macerated dumpling skin for the baby.
A woman beside me on a plane, maybe mid-sixties, watches Reels on her phone. I scroll through my own feed.
After dinner, decadently fed and watered, he stands next to me, leans in, his body vibrating.
I’m nervous on the phone so I wrote my query to the tax office on an envelope before I rang.
Bedtime. I lie on my back in a bedroom that is not mine, balancing a Mary Oliver poetry collection on my bent legs.
“Finished! It’s our family!”
The emerald ring my grandfather placed on the hand of the woman he expected would grow old alongside him.
Another circle round, wobbly on my skates, and the DJ said the magic words, "Requests open."
The tower speakers blared “My Generation.” “Pinball Wizard” followed.
"Grab the fence," he said. So I did.
Mom wouldn’t let my sister and me have a pet. After futile letters to Santa, we were told he couldn’t give gifts in contravention of one’s parents’ wishes.
Four dirt roads converge a quarter mile up the hill from my house. In August the dust gets so dry at the crossroads that I can see every track.
We flew down a country road on his 175cc Honda, roared up a hill, missed a curve, climbed an embankment and went airborne above a fallow field.
“I have to leave,” I tell my sister. We are in my room, the plywood of my floors exposed and my walls still unpainted.